Cybersecurity Alert Fatigue! How Threat Intelligence Can Turn Data Overload Into Actionable Insights

If one is good, then a thousand must be better—right? Ask any SOC manager, and they’ll tell you that rule only applies to days off, not the flood of threat alerts drowning their teams daily.

Security teams are bombarded with mountains of threat intelligence, yet the real challenge isn’t collecting data—it’s making sense of it. Without the right approach you open your security team to cybersecurity alert fatigue, meaning valuable insights get buried in noise, leading to slow response times and missed genuine threats.

This blog will explore how to combat alert fatigue by cutting through the clutter, enriching raw security threat data with context, and automating processes so your security team can act with speed, precision, and confidence.

Too Many Cyber Threats in Too Many Places

Organizations today find themselves defending against attacks on all fronts, with AI only making things incalculably harder. Unsurprisingly, in the ‘Age of Information,’ getting the data on cyber threats is not the hard part. It’s knowing what to do with it – and understanding it, in most cases.

Security professionals have to sift through both structured and unstructured threat data, emanating from both human and machine sources (think anything from logs to SIEMS and SOARs to open-source threat feeds from around the world). This massive load of threat intelligence often bottlenecks cybersecurity teams, tying them up with “too much good stuff” and hamstringing their ability to use it to effectively respond to genuine threats, if at all.

Even using a security tool to bring different threat telemetries together can fall short for the following reasons:

• The data might be aggregated, but it’s not correlated or analyzed.
• There isn’t a smooth process for sharing information or collaborating on fixes.
• A security tool can overlook (or lack the ability to ingest) indicators of compromise (IOCs) at scale, because those take behavioral-driven threat detection to find.

Manual Processes Aren’t Working

In many cases, security teams are still required to do a lot of the alert management heavy lifting manually: putting the pieces together, hunting down the potential threat(s), determining which cybersecurity alerts are worth the hunt, correlating internal threat intel with external threat data, and more. It’s not that the manual approach doesn’t work in theory, it’s that it’s virtually impossible in real life given the scale of today’s threat intelligence landscape and the magnitude and complexity of modern environments.

Faced with the constant barrage of security alerts and the discouragement of hardly getting to any, SOCs face threat intel fatigue, burnout, and the prospect of simply having to ignore a lot of the leads that come their way. You may be surprised to find out that:

• Despite modern tools, an average of 65% of security incidents go undetected.
• Manual security processes take 80% longer than automated ones.
• Responding to a single threat incident currently requires coordination across 19 different tools, on average.

The key problem isn’t getting more threat data, it’s organizing it so that it makes sense. That’s why the solution lies not only in aggregating the right threat intel, but in managing it so that it spits out actionable insights.

To combat threat intel fatigue, you need to invest in threat intelligence management.

Threat Intelligence Management: Get Insights that Matter

A threat intelligence management platform takes the busywork of a manual threat intelligence process and automates it, getting teams from raw threat inputs to actionable insights in close to real-time. It collects threat data from multiple integrated sources (VirusTotal, Mandiant, Polyswarm, etc.) and uses it to enrich threat data found internally. It can also score IOCs based on severity, using an advanced correlation engine, so teams receiving that data can know which security incident to put their efforts into first.

Using the right threat intelligence management platform, your organization can fully automate the threat intelligence lifecycle, from ingestion to actioning. You’ll be empowered to:

• Pull in threat data from multiple threat sources, both internal and external (ISACs, SIEMs, SOAR tools, etc.).
• Clean up data so it’s uniform once it hits the SOC (standardized and enhanced with relevant context and severity scores).
• View all aggregated, standardized threat data in one spot (via a centralized dashboard that allows for visualization and control).
• Not only receive, but share, threat intelligence with external sources (a compliance requirement in some frameworks like DORA or NIS2).
• Respond quickly by integrating threat intelligence management with security technologies, creating automated real-time threat responses.
• Orchestrate and customize simplified threat intelligence management for themselves, using vendor-neutral, low-code/no-code solutions.

With threat intel coming in on autopilot (and being automatically correlated, enriched, analyzed, shared, and routed to the right places), SOCs that once did this whole process manually will have a lot more time on their hands to pursue threats, not just try to figure them out. And the best part is, using the cyber fusion approach, those actionable insights can be seamlessly integrated with your security solutions to launch straight into automated response. This final step completes the process, operationalizing threat intelligence to do what it was always meant to; power proactive cybersecurity strategies in real-time.

This is exactly what Cyware offers-a threat intelligence platform that empowers you to proactively manage threats, enhance security operations, and facilitate collaboration across security, IT, development, and the business.

To learn more about turning threat intelligence straw into actionable threat intelligence gold, check out Cyware’s Threat Intelligence Management platform today.